Raster image processing (RIP'ing) is the process of translating digital vector image data into bit-mapped image data or raster bits for rendering. Such vector image data is generally expressed in Page Description Language (PDL) such as Printer Control Language® (PCL), Portable Document Format (PDF), or PostScript® (PS). In the printing field, one or more hardware and/or software implemented raster image process (RIP) engines are commonly used by print shops to RIP large print jobs or documents for printing on a printing press. Hereinafter, a RIP engine is often referred to as a RIP resource. When one or RIP resources, which may be implemented across any number of computing devices, are configured to work on a particular print job the RIP resources are collectively referred to as a pipeline.
When using several RIP engines to RIP a single print job, the print job may be divided into multiple partitions. Each partition is a piece of the print job that is operated on by a respective RIP engine in the pipeline. During the RIP'ing process, a RIP engine may fail to successfully RIP a particular partition. The particular partition may fail to RIP, for example, when the RIP engine has a temporary or permanent malfunction (e.g., a power outage, an environmental malfunction, etc.). Responsive to such a failure, existing techniques require that entire print job to be re-submitted and re-RIP'd. This requires administrative intervention to resubmit the failed print job and also requires all of the processing and memory resources that were initially required to attempt to RIP the print job. Since such failures are generally unanticipated, these types of failures can substantially disrupt the workflow in a print shop.
Additionally, if any one or more of the partitions in a print job contains a serious syntactical or structural error(s), the RIP'ing process may fail and the entire print job must be pulled off the pipeline to manually locate and correct the error(s) of the faulty partition(s) before the entire print job is resubmitted for RIP'ing. This is a time consuming, labor intensive, and computer processing resource intensive process because a single partition may represent hundreds or thousands of pages of PDL. Thus, locating a syntactical and/or structural error(s) in a failed print job is a labor intensive and time consuming activity for administrators.
Even after such an error is located, the entire print job must be resubmitted to the print shop for re-RIP'ing. Since print shop workflow typically changes over time, a pipeline may or may not be available at the time for re-RIP'ing the print job. Additionally, even if the RIP'ing resources are available, the resources may need to be moved from other pipeline(s) and reconfigured based on the attributes of this particular print job. For these reasons, faulty print jobs can not only be inconvenient, but they can also be substantially time consuming, labor intensive, and expensive to correct. Techniques to overcome the time, labor, and cost generally experienced due to faulty print jobs are greatly desired.